


somewhere in the middle is sun

by notorious



Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Light Angst, slice of life-ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:54:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28350492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notorious/pseuds/notorious
Summary: Din gives the child to Luke and isn't sure where to go from there. Cara gives him a place, however impermanent.
Relationships: Din Djarin/Cara Dune
Comments: 15
Kudos: 150





	somewhere in the middle is sun

**Author's Note:**

> hello !!! and welcome to my first attempt at writing either of these characters!! this started as a way for me to kill time at work this morning and evolved into angst re: planets people miss and a bit of bonding between bros who might wanna bone. this got dialogue heavy by accident bc apparently i think cara has a lot to say. pls do enjoy (but if you don't just go read something else i wrote). unedited. title from missing the miracle by alanis morissette.

“You want to talk about it?”

Cara’s trying not to look at Din. She fiddles with her blaster’s stun/kill switch.

“Not really.”

Din wishes she’d just stare. Might be easier that way, if they got the weirdness out of the way stat. But he doesn’t want her to study him, so perhaps it’s better this way. Choosing better over easier has been his way ever since he stole the child.

Cara pushes a flask across the little table they share at the back of the bridge. “Want to drink about it?”

Not really.

“Couldn’t hurt,” he says instead. He drinks. The liquor is harsh, heavy on his tongue but smooth and scorching down his throat. It takes like the deserts of Arvala-7, the tinny smell of melting Beskar, like copper and blood in his mouth, like the sand and blaster fire of Nevarro; he smothers a cough, fixing Cara with wide angry eyes, but she still won’t look at him. “What is this?”

“Wait for it,” she says.

As he begins to protest she holds up a hand.

Din crosses his arms, armor heavy against his tired body, and forces his mouth into a thin line. He counts to ten before opening his mouth to speak. 

Something stops him. A new taste, one that hits him in the chest like a stun bolt.

His ears ring and he wonders if he’s been drugged. He flexes his fingers weakly. Before his eyes the world begins to shift out of focus. His body won’t budge, so that checks out.

“ _What does it taste like?_ ”

Cara’s voice sounds far. She’s floating away from him, or him from her, or Gideon’s cruiser is breaking apart and everything’s drifting away from everything else. Din can’t tell what’s right.

“ _C’mon_ ,” Cara urges, but now she’s right in his ear, loud as the boom that blew the Death Star. _C’mon c’mon c’mon._ “What’s it taste like?”

“Like…” He’s not sure how to place it, how to phrase it. It’s a taste he recognizes—earthy, like damp grass, muddy waters rich with little bioluminescent crustaceans, like—“Omera,” he gasps. “The tea she used to bring.”

Cara’s coming back to him, her voice isn’t too loud or too far anymore. She takes form before him, asking, “Oh yeah?” Broad shoulders rise and fall with steady breath. Light catches the tiny ink up high on her cheek and the whites of her teeth as she chuckles.

“On Sorgan,” Din says. It takes him a minute to swallow, like his breath becomes syrup, like he’s drinking in thick air. He blinks slowly once, twice, and on the third time his eyes flutter open his world has steadied again. Back to normal.

Except Cara’s looking at him now. Shamelessly, studying him like he’s a readout on a ship monitor. And, for the very first time, there is nothing between their faces. Nothing to keep his emotions from betraying him. No Beskar, no tinted visor. 

He’d taken the helmet off for the child, for the goodbye he prays won’t be their last, because he’d met no living thing worthy of breaking his creed until Grogu.

But he doesn’t hate how Cara looks at him now, like she’s searching for a hidden message within his code. Not his chain code, that one can blow to hell, but the code that makes Din the man he is. He wouldn’t be upset if she found one. 

“The tea,” he says, “it was never sweet. It was—”

“The best you’ve ever had,” Cara says, eyes creasing at the corners as she smiles. It’s a bit of a sad smile. “I know. I can see it in your face.”

“What _was_ that?”

“Qeff wine,” she says. She takes up the flask and swallows, and the drink does not rattle her as it did Din. “It lets you taste fond memories. For a price.”

Din thinks. Shakes his head. “I don’t understand.”

“What did you taste before the tea?”

Arvala-7.

Molten Beskar.

Nevarro, a certain time around.

“Planets,” he says dismissively, “and Beskar.”

“What happened on those planets? And with Beskar?”

Frustration, that’s what happened. Meeting the Ugnaught, wrangling a blurrg. Being forced to team-up with the bounty droid IG-11. Blaster fire raining down on Din from left, right, and above. Enough Nikto guards to make any other bounty unworthy ( _the Beskar_ , he remembers thinking, _must return the Beskar to Mandalorian hands_ ). They put down the entire facility, he and IG-11. Frying Nikto left and right. Obtaining the bounty—the child. The Razor Crest stripped to scrap metal. Hanging on to the side of that sandcrawler for dear life. The Mudhorn. The egg.

Back to Nevarro. Turning the child over to the client. Worrying. Returning to the covert, to the armorer. Beskar at melting point. Even then he could only think of the child. Even the sight of such precious metal being formed to his shoulder was not enough to tear him from the fear that he had done a disservice handing the child over. That fear would plague him until the child was with him once more, and Din Djarin was no fan of fear he could not explain.

Nevarro, again, another time. Listening helplessly via comlink while the Imp’s scout troopers chased down Kuill and swiped the child. His child.

Being a child—battle droids, blaster fire, his parents blown to dust before him—and being responsible for the child were the only two times in his life Din could point to and say _yes_ , _I was helpless_. There was little he hated more than that feeling.

“The taste of sorrow,” Cara says. “That’s the price.”

“Right.”

Later, they’re flying aimlessly. Taking Gideon’s cruiser on a joyride for the hell of it. They could all use a break. A moment to breathe and lay back and reset for a new day.

No need for anyone to stay up and keep watch but Din is used to cautious nights. Without his helmet, however, he can’t observe anyone without the risk of catching their eye. Cara, though, is fast asleep.

They’re in a small passageway off the bridge, lounging opposite each other on the floor. Backs against walls, legs stretched out before them. Din looks at Cara and a breath catches in his throat. She’s lighter now that he’s without the helmet and has no visor to filter unnecessary light. It had filtered out more than he realized; the warmth in her cheeks, the pink of her lips. The sun-kissed skin of a desert planet dweller.

It doesn’t take long for him to realize how much he likes looking at Cara like this. Without a filter.

About as long as it takes him to feel weird about looking, for she was kind enough not to stare at him once the helmet came off, but he figures if he were the one asleep she wouldn’t hesitate to look. He thinks he’s all right with that.

He knocks their boots together, says, “Cara.”

She doesn’t open her eyes, leaves her arms crossed. “Hm?”

“That wine,” Din says. “Where did it come from?”

“Venom of the Calqeff lizard.” 

“Right.”

“Found only on Alderaan.”

“But Alderaan is—”

“Extinct since Alderaan’s destruction,” Cara says. She’s wide awake now, eyes open, shoulders rolled back against the wall behind her. Her eyes drop to the stripes around her arm. “Calqeff had six legs, four eyes, eleven spikes down their backs to the tip of their tails. In summers they were white. Brown in winter to absorb heat from the sun. My father—”

“You don’t have to—”

“My father farmed them when I was young,” she says.

Din isn’t sure why she’s confiding in him but he can feel an important admission is forthcoming and he does not intend to stop it.

“My father was the first to discover their venom acts as a coagulant when applied to skin. Real helpful for bleeders on the battlefield.” Cara frees her flask from her belt and holds it up to the light. 

It’s then Din notices the faint carving in the metal: the head of a reptile with four symmetrical eyes, one enlarged protruding fang, and a stout little horn on its snout. What he would call a signet.

“When I left for the Alliance he sent me off with a cask of venom,” she says. “Didn’t take me long to figure out it had other properties when ingested.”

Din nods.

“So I started diluting it to make it last longer. First with water, then ale. But I prefer it with Tusken Wind,” Cara says, turning the flask over in her hands, thumbs grazing the tarnished metal. “This is my last flask. The last thing I have of my family.”

Din stills. He doesn’t understand. “Why would you share that with me?” He understands the significance of family, what he would give for a piece of his mother and father. So, “I’m not worthy of that,” he admits.

“Say that again and I’ll make sure the Guild knows you’re the dumbest Mandalorian this side of the Rim,” she says (and he does not doubt her for a second).

“Cara.”

“When I drink this I taste the ripple in the galaxy as Alderaan was blown to hell,” she says. “It tastes like pain that nothing can fix, like it’s inside of my veins and desperate to claw its way out to consume me.”

“That” —Din prays to be sensitive, which he’s still working on, but while he is frequently a man of few words he longs for this talk to last— “doesn’t answer my question.”

“And then I taste Yavin 4,” she tells him, and she’s beginning to smile, “and the sharp flight of shrapnel through space as the Death Star succumbs. Endor; the bark of the trees, the ashes of a celebratory bonfire. And then, after all that?” Cara’s grinning now, and her lips shimmer like starlight, but she stops the next tear that falls before it can reach her mouth. “I taste home. Snow-capped mountains, white synthstone, the rains of Isatabith forest. The food markets in Aldera.”

Din doesn’t think he’s ever seen someone smiling look so sad.

“When I taste all that,” Cara says, “I can pretend, even if just for a second, that Alderaan is still there. I can pretend there’s peace. And you” —she kicks his boot— “are the only person I’ve met in a _damn_ long time worth sharing something like that with.”

 _Oh_ , Din thinks.

“I don’t know what to say,” he says.

“Don’t say anything,” Cara tells him. “Just don’t forget where you came from.”

Din clenches his jaw, thinks again of his war-torn home planet.

“No,” Cara says. “Not there. The moment you decided to grab the kid and take him to the stars to save him, that’s what I mean. _That_ is where you’re from. Never forget that.”

**Author's Note:**

> if u made it this far i have nothing to offer you but my thanks which is likely worthless but you've got it anyhow so godspeed


End file.
